Various types of software development applications exist that software developers may use to develop software. An integrated development environment (IDE) is a type of software development application that contains several development tools in one package. An IDE may include tools such as a source code editor, a build automation tool, and a debugger. Examples of IDEs include Eclipse™ developed by Eclipse Foundation of Ottawa, Canada, ActiveState Komodo™ developed by ActiveState of Vancouver, Canada, IntelliJ IDEA developed by JetBrains of the Czech Republic, Oracle JDeveloper™ developed by Oracle Corporation of Redwood City, Calif., NetBeans developed by Oracle Corporation, Codenvy™ developed by Codenvy of San Francisco, Calif., Xcode® developed by Apple Corporation of Cupertino, Calif., and Microsoft® Visual Studio®, developed by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.
In the art of software development, software may be jointly developed by different developers utilizing different computing devices. In such a distributed development environment, coordination may be required to ensure that the source code files that are being created and updated on the different computing devices are ultimately synchronized into one definitive or authoritative set of source code files.
Also, in the art of software development, source code files may be developed on one computing device and then copied to a different computing device to support a remote build. For example, source code files may be developed on a personal computer (PC) running a Microsoft® Windows® operating system and then such files may be copied to a different type of machine (e.g., an Apple® Mac® computer running IOS®, or a Raspberry Pi® computer), where they are used to build executable software. Since source code development is typically an iterative process, different versions of such source code files may be iteratively copied to the remote computing device, where they are allowed to overwrite previous versions of the same files. Furthermore, source code files may be modified on two or more different machines running different IDEs (e.g., a Microsoft® Windows® PC running Visual Studio® and an Apple® Mac® computer running Xcode®), and such files may need to be copied in any direction between such machines (e.g., from a first machine to a second machine as well as from the second machine to the first machine).